The paper analyzes the role of labor market segmentation and relative wage rigidity in the transmission process of macroeconomic shocks in a two-sector optimizing model of a small open economy. The analysis is first conducted in the context of perfect intersectoral labor mobility. The discussion...

Institutional and market frictions impose costs on the reallocation of labor from low to high productivity sectors, leading to suboptimal allocations and a loss in aggregate labor productivity. Using cross-country sector-level data, we use a dynamic panel error correction model to compute the...

This paper studies whether labor market mismatch played an important role for labor market dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic. We apply the framework of Sahin and others (2014) to the US and the UK to measure misallocation between job seekers and vacancies across sectors until the third...

Raising South Africa's low employment rate to levels seen in emerging market or advanced economy peers could raise GDP per capita by 50 to 60 percent and reduce income inequality dramatically in the long term. By putting further strain on an already fragile labor market, Covid-19 has raised the...

The aim of this paper is to analyze unemployment and labor market developments in Algeria and assess the factors that may hamper employment creation. The results of the paper suggest that the relative low output-employment elasticities and rigid labor market are the main factors behind the still...

The paper surveys three broad categories of labor market institutions in Italy: employment protection legislation, unemployment benefit systems, and wage bargaining arrangements. In each case, the recent evolution and current state of Italian institutions are evaluated and compared with those in...

This paper summarizes statistics on the key aspects of the distribution of earnings levels and earnings changes using administrative (social security) data from Italy between 1985 and 2016. During the time covered by our data, earnings inequality and earnings volatility increased, while earnings...

Spain's export performance strengthened after the global financial crisis, and exports now represent more than a third of GDP. This paper argues that several factors contributed to that achievement: external demand, supported by greater diversification of destination markets; enhanced export...